Americans constitute 5% of the worlds population, yet we consume 24% of its energy.
Please stop using this bogus comparison to imply that Americans use more than "their share" of the world's energy. The correct comparison is between inputs and outputs. The USA produces nearly 20% of the world's GDP. If your 24% is correct, we have room for improvements in energy efficiency, but we're not nearly the energy gluttons that you're suggesting. The low ratio of population to energy use is largely due to our high productivity.
I have long held the belief that software can be life critical at times and software engineers should be held to the same professionalism as any other form of engineering.
It is a matter of fact, not belief, that software can be life critical. For the majority of software, though, cost and time-to-market considerations far outweigh coding to the highest professional standard. "Good enough" wins.
In most places "Software Engineers" meet no accreditation requirements, have no requirement to belong to any society which regulates ethics, experience or training.
I've worked with real engineers, ethics was more important than their education.
There is no requirement to belong, but at least there is a society that promulgates ethics.
P.S.: I'm quite skeptical about sequestration of CO2. I don't think it will work, and if it does work, I think it will be too expensive to use. The BEST form of sequestration is to grow forests, turn them into paper, and print books on them, with chemically treated paper so it won't decay. This doesn't add in exogenous energy costs, and storage is not a major issue. If it is, just build more libraries...and fund them to retain books. Burying CO2 can expect to have undetected leakages over a period of time, and to add significantly to the cost of generating energy. To me it looks like a boondoggle created to justify continuing to burn coal.
Carbon capture plants will require 25–40% more coal to produce the same amount of electricity compared to blithely-dump-CO2-into-the-air plants.That would tighten up the competition with wind and solar, but not make it "too expensive to use". CO2 leaking from storage remains a legitimate concern.
I can't be replaced because I write fiction for a living. In English. I can write up to 12,000 words a day.
An AI capable of writing fiction that people would buy and read may well be less than 30 years away. Once it happens even James Patterson will play John Henry to the indefatigable writing automaton.
Here's an idea: eliminate ALL subsidies, across the board. Let fossil fuels and renewables duke it out on a truly level playing field. Speaking as a "green energy" advocate, I would welcome this challenge.
Fossil fuels, having been subsidized for many decades longer, have a huge head start. Also, you will never get agreement on what constitutes a subsidy; in my view the absence of a carbon tax and much of the cost of maintaining the U.S. naval presence in the Middle East should count.
Kind of a side rant, but I'm not sure what the ultimate purpose of preventing man-made global warming is supposed to be. The best argument I've heard is to prevent the loss of landmass to rising sea water, but that's already going to happen anyways (less than 100k years ago Los Angeles was under water, and no matter what we do it will one day again be under water.) Higher global temperatures have historically resulted in more arable land rather than simple increased droughts. If you want more physical landmass, then you'll need to drop the climate to ice age levels where biodiversity actually tends to suffer. During the age of dinosaurs, the carbon dioxidie PPM was 18 times higher than it is now, biodiversity was at one of its peaks, the overall climate was 8C warmer, and plantlife was more abundant than ever. In other words, history has shown that a warmer planet is literally a more green one.
So what kind of disaster is anti-climate change supposed to avert again?
The rate of change is a potential problem. How many million years did it take after the dinosaurs for 8C of cooling? The ocean rising at a rate that puts LA back underwater in 100,000 years wouldn't cause much trouble, but what if every coastal city needs to fight off the sea Dutch-style within just 100 years? Hundreds of millions of people could be displaced, with widespread social, economic, and political effects.
And a humanoid robot can go where we go, which is useful in places where they work alongside us or share our environment (think: stairs!).
Instead of robots that can use stairs, I just deploy robo-servants on each floor. I also have a specialized robot, named "Otis", for moving things between floors.
Everything I read is about is science looking for evidence that it's happening and man made. I don't read much of anything about science looking for evidence that it either isn't happening or isn't caused by man.
When looking at changes in the ranges that various plants and animals inhabit, that could be evidence for or against.
When looking at changes in glaciers or sea ice, that could be evidence for or against.
When measuring temperatures of the atmosphere and oceans, that could be evidence for or against.
The majority of the evidence says that global warming is happening, and that human activities do play a role. "Global warming is happening" and "human activities contribute to warming" are pretty much settled science. This doesn't mean "accepted as unquestionable truth" but that profound contradictory evidence would need to be found.
How much warming will happen, how quickly, and what the consequences will be are matters of less certainty. Unfortunately the lesser certainty occurs precisely where answers are needed in order to make socio-political decisions regarding what steps, if any, should be taken to limit global warming and mitigate its effects. People who insist that warming cannot possibly be happening or that human activity cannot possibly be a significant cause are equally unhelpful as those who insist that "the science is settled" and drastic measures must be taken immediately without regard to the non-climatic consequences.
Thou with SODIS use glass if you can do to the endocrine disruptors BPA and BPS
being in most plastic bottles.
The very Wikipedia article you linked to says to use PTE bottles, because some glass bottles will absorb the UV before it gets to the water, and that the leaching of material from plastic bottles into the water has been studied and found not to be of concern.
What is cheap to you? I would have thought the Imp ($25, incs WiFi) and Beetle ($7-8, no Wifi) would output 100mA per GPIO pin.
You would have thought wrong: the imp module maxes out at 20 mA on its LED pins. I couldn't find an output current spec for the Beetle, but it claims to be a mini Arduino Leonardo, so I wouldn't expect more than the Leonardo's 40 mA per pin.
"What is cheap" is a good question--for those who can live with two chips (the horror!), a $6 TLC5940 will get you 16 channels that drive 120 mA each (just the first chip I found).
Pretty hard to prevent when they can display arbitrary images. You'd have to do something they couldn't replicate, like personalizing it per user, or using a reserved part of the screen.
Trivial: just put a very obvious and different border around any dialog raised by the browser, like thick red and black hashing or something equally unsubtle. It's wouldn't solve every problem, but making it really obvious when it's a pop-up would help.
Your "trivial" solution won't help when the pop-up is a floating div on a web page instead of an actual window. You need to decorate the real OS windows in a way that an attacker cannot know ("personalizing it per user", in GP AC's words). This is similar to the "personal security image" used by some banking and credit card sites, where an attacker trying to make a fake login page has no way of knowing what picture is supposed to be next to the password entry box.
It does strike me as interesting that unlike the views from orbit we see regularly that show population and technology density (e.g. the one making the point of North Korea's much weaker economic development than South Korea), where cities glow brightly against the rural darkness--the "dark side" of the Earth in the picture is absolutely dark in its entirety.
Perhaps everything but the sun's illumination is filtered by the atmosphere from that distance? We certainly would have had comparable populations (hence comparable artificial lighting) in 1969...
Even the world's greatest light polluting metropolis emits a puny amount of light compared to what Earth reflects from its sunlit side. The night side is "absolutely dark in its entirety" simply due to underexposure.
You're underestimating a synthesizer. Take a look at a Moog sometime. There's a lot of knobs and dials, and they all do something (and most of them do something that was nearly impossible with any other instrument invented). A saxophone can't gradually alter its entire timber mid-phrase, the closest wind instruments have are the various kinds of mute, each limited in its ability in a way a synthesizer isn't..
I think you missed the point. A saxophonist with a wind MIDI controller can play a synth with a similar level of expressiveness as that provided by a keyboard plus pitch and modulation controllers. However, no Minimoog patch sounds much like a real saxophone. A physical modeling synth played with a breath controller can sound pretty good, but not quite "right". Kind of like how human actors in front of a digital matte painting look fine, but digital actors have the "Uncanny Valley" problem.
GP AC: "...it still will require some type of v-drum set to handle the different ways of striking the drum head." Similarly, a breath controller is very helpful for wind instruments. Many real instruments have special playing techniques that are difficult to completely emulate in virtual instruments.
Slashdot Mirror
Americans constitute 5% of the worlds population, yet we consume 24% of its energy.
Please stop using this bogus comparison to imply that Americans use more than "their share" of the world's energy. The correct comparison is between inputs and outputs. The USA produces nearly 20% of the world's GDP. If your 24% is correct, we have room for improvements in energy efficiency, but we're not nearly the energy gluttons that you're suggesting. The low ratio of population to energy use is largely due to our high productivity.
Shesh, nope. First, what tax subsidies are you talking about? There is no way Coal is subsidized, nor is oil and gas.
Do a little research. Here's a starting point.
It's going to be cheaper to make electricity by natural gas for a LONG time, especially over solar.
That depends on how bad the fracking earthquakes get.
I'd rather be a marauder. What's an good apocalypse without them?
I am reminded of the words of the notorious pirate Bartholomew Roberts: "...a merry life and a short one shall be my motto."
I have long held the belief that software can be life critical at times and software engineers should be held to the same professionalism as any other form of engineering.
It is a matter of fact, not belief, that software can be life critical. For the majority of software, though, cost and time-to-market considerations far outweigh coding to the highest professional standard. "Good enough" wins.
In most places "Software Engineers" meet no accreditation requirements, have no requirement to belong to any society which regulates ethics, experience or training.
I've worked with real engineers, ethics was more important than their education.
There is no requirement to belong, but at least there is a society that promulgates ethics.
Trying to stuff everyone into a particular mold is like something straight out of Anthem or 1984, and it just doesnt work.
Right. Best to take a page out of "Brave New World", so everyone from alphas to epsilons can be happy.
If I get my hands on the asshat who's been poaching my unicorns there'll be hell to pay
It's those guys from the marketing department.
Can you show me the math that proves that there's no difference between an uncompressed audio source and a 320kbps mp3?
There's a difference between "no difference at all" and "no difference that can be detected by human hearing".
P.S.: I'm quite skeptical about sequestration of CO2. I don't think it will work, and if it does work, I think it will be too expensive to use. The BEST form of sequestration is to grow forests, turn them into paper, and print books on them, with chemically treated paper so it won't decay. This doesn't add in exogenous energy costs, and storage is not a major issue. If it is, just build more libraries...and fund them to retain books. Burying CO2 can expect to have undetected leakages over a period of time, and to add significantly to the cost of generating energy. To me it looks like a boondoggle created to justify continuing to burn coal.
Carbon capture plants will require 25–40% more coal to produce the same amount of electricity compared to blithely-dump-CO2-into-the-air plants.That would tighten up the competition with wind and solar, but not make it "too expensive to use". CO2 leaking from storage remains a legitimate concern.
As for growing forests, I like the idea of turning them into buildings.
If you don't use soap ever, you probably are human contact free too... although what did they use before soap was made?
Ancient Romans used olive oil.
I can't be replaced because I write fiction for a living. In English. I can write up to 12,000 words a day.
An AI capable of writing fiction that people would buy and read may well be less than 30 years away. Once it happens even James Patterson will play John Henry to the indefatigable writing automaton.
and what if it was paid for by using bitcoin...
now i think this post has all the magic words to make it a successful slashertisment.
Not all of the magic words. "What if the next presidential limo was a 3D-printed Tesla paid for with bitcoin?" Now we're getting there.
Here's an idea: eliminate ALL subsidies, across the board. Let fossil fuels and renewables duke it out on a truly level playing field. Speaking as a "green energy" advocate, I would welcome this challenge.
Fossil fuels, having been subsidized for many decades longer, have a huge head start. Also, you will never get agreement on what constitutes a subsidy; in my view the absence of a carbon tax and much of the cost of maintaining the U.S. naval presence in the Middle East should count.
Kind of a side rant, but I'm not sure what the ultimate purpose of preventing man-made global warming is supposed to be. The best argument I've heard is to prevent the loss of landmass to rising sea water, but that's already going to happen anyways (less than 100k years ago Los Angeles was under water, and no matter what we do it will one day again be under water.) Higher global temperatures have historically resulted in more arable land rather than simple increased droughts. If you want more physical landmass, then you'll need to drop the climate to ice age levels where biodiversity actually tends to suffer. During the age of dinosaurs, the carbon dioxidie PPM was 18 times higher than it is now, biodiversity was at one of its peaks, the overall climate was 8C warmer, and plantlife was more abundant than ever. In other words, history has shown that a warmer planet is literally a more green one.
So what kind of disaster is anti-climate change supposed to avert again?
The rate of change is a potential problem. How many million years did it take after the dinosaurs for 8C of cooling? The ocean rising at a rate that puts LA back underwater in 100,000 years wouldn't cause much trouble, but what if every coastal city needs to fight off the sea Dutch-style within just 100 years? Hundreds of millions of people could be displaced, with widespread social, economic, and political effects.
And a humanoid robot can go where we go, which is useful in places where they work alongside us or share our environment (think: stairs!).
Instead of robots that can use stairs, I just deploy robo-servants on each floor. I also have a specialized robot, named "Otis", for moving things between floors.
It isn't unkonwn for wind and solar power generation to have a higher "carbon footprint" than regular fossil fuel plants.
citation needed
Everything I read is about is science looking for evidence that it's happening and man made. I don't read much of anything about science looking for evidence that it either isn't happening or isn't caused by man.
When looking at changes in the ranges that various plants and animals inhabit, that could be evidence for or against.
When looking at changes in glaciers or sea ice, that could be evidence for or against.
When measuring temperatures of the atmosphere and oceans, that could be evidence for or against.
The majority of the evidence says that global warming is happening, and that human activities do play a role. "Global warming is happening" and "human activities contribute to warming" are pretty much settled science. This doesn't mean "accepted as unquestionable truth" but that profound contradictory evidence would need to be found.
How much warming will happen, how quickly, and what the consequences will be are matters of less certainty. Unfortunately the lesser certainty occurs precisely where answers are needed in order to make socio-political decisions regarding what steps, if any, should be taken to limit global warming and mitigate its effects. People who insist that warming cannot possibly be happening or that human activity cannot possibly be a significant cause are equally unhelpful as those who insist that "the science is settled" and drastic measures must be taken immediately without regard to the non-climatic consequences.
Thou with SODIS use glass if you can do to the endocrine disruptors BPA and BPS being in most plastic bottles.
The very Wikipedia article you linked to says to use PTE bottles, because some glass bottles will absorb the UV before it gets to the water, and that the leaching of material from plastic bottles into the water has been studied and found not to be of concern.
Standard mirrors probably use much more silver than this.
Standard mirrors are generally "silvered" with aluminum.
What is cheap to you? I would have thought the Imp ($25, incs WiFi) and Beetle ($7-8, no Wifi) would output 100mA per GPIO pin.
You would have thought wrong: the imp module maxes out at 20 mA on its LED pins. I couldn't find an output current spec for the Beetle, but it claims to be a mini Arduino Leonardo, so I wouldn't expect more than the Leonardo's 40 mA per pin.
"What is cheap" is a good question--for those who can live with two chips (the horror!), a $6 TLC5940 will get you 16 channels that drive 120 mA each (just the first chip I found).
Pretty hard to prevent when they can display arbitrary images. You'd have to do something they couldn't replicate, like personalizing it per user, or using a reserved part of the screen.
Trivial: just put a very obvious and different border around any dialog raised by the browser, like thick red and black hashing or something equally unsubtle. It's wouldn't solve every problem, but making it really obvious when it's a pop-up would help.
Your "trivial" solution won't help when the pop-up is a floating div on a web page instead of an actual window. You need to decorate the real OS windows in a way that an attacker cannot know ("personalizing it per user", in GP AC's words). This is similar to the "personal security image" used by some banking and credit card sites, where an attacker trying to make a fake login page has no way of knowing what picture is supposed to be next to the password entry box.
It does strike me as interesting that unlike the views from orbit we see regularly that show population and technology density (e.g. the one making the point of North Korea's much weaker economic development than South Korea), where cities glow brightly against the rural darkness--the "dark side" of the Earth in the picture is absolutely dark in its entirety.
Perhaps everything but the sun's illumination is filtered by the atmosphere from that distance? We certainly would have had comparable populations (hence comparable artificial lighting) in 1969...
Even the world's greatest light polluting metropolis emits a puny amount of light compared to what Earth reflects from its sunlit side. The night side is "absolutely dark in its entirety" simply due to underexposure.
You're underestimating a synthesizer. Take a look at a Moog sometime. There's a lot of knobs and dials, and they all do something (and most of them do something that was nearly impossible with any other instrument invented). A saxophone can't gradually alter its entire timber mid-phrase, the closest wind instruments have are the various kinds of mute, each limited in its ability in a way a synthesizer isn't..
I think you missed the point. A saxophonist with a wind MIDI controller can play a synth with a similar level of expressiveness as that provided by a keyboard plus pitch and modulation controllers. However, no Minimoog patch sounds much like a real saxophone. A physical modeling synth played with a breath controller can sound pretty good, but not quite "right". Kind of like how human actors in front of a digital matte painting look fine, but digital actors have the "Uncanny Valley" problem.
GP AC: "...it still will require some type of v-drum set to handle the different ways of striking the drum head." Similarly, a breath controller is very helpful for wind instruments. Many real instruments have special playing techniques that are difficult to completely emulate in virtual instruments.
Particle physicists are smart people, so they want to build a safe underground shelter for the years to come.
"Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!"
The Mars Scorecard could really use an update.