Oh come on, there are plenty of reasons to not use fuel cells. Terrible power density, severely complex storage of fuels, inefficient decentralization of power generation.
It's making less sense because you're forgetting the concept of a "credit crunch". What do you think will happen to the economy if college students stop taking student loans?
And that's exactly what people have been fighting: Regulation of Bitcoin, taxing of Bitcoin, treating Bitcoin as a legal currency, subjecting Bitcoin to SEC rules, etc. They want it to be a Libertarian wet dream with no rules.
Look at interest schedules. You often find situations where 50% of the loan is interest; but most of the interest comes up front because it's accruing on a huge balance being slowly paid down. You have $200k in that loan, you make a $1000 payment that's $990 interest accrued over 1 month; you have $50k in that loan, you make a $1000 payment that's $250 interest accrued over 1 month. The balance starts coming down much, much faster--the amount of interest that one month is 25% of what it was on the first payment, but the amount of interest over that year's payments is much less than 25% of what the bank got for the first year because you're paying your loan balance down faster.
Credit card schedules where you make minimum payments take forever to pay off. In the process, you'll pay many times more than the balance on your card. The bank also gets to claim the balance as an asset and deduct that when you default--in some cases with high-dollar mortgages, the bank can bring in more than the loan and then claim a loss (i.e. if the amount of interest they accrue is less than the remaining balance, but the remaining balance is still more than the amount of interest they accrue, they will claim a loss even though they physically have more dollars now with your total made payments all together).
There are plenty of ways to loan out piles and piles of money, have people fail to pay it back, and walk off with sacks of cash. Credit card companies--banks, actually, since Visa just rakes fees and banks stamp VISA on their cards and let VISA supply the infrastructure--sure as hell do make the bulk of their money off those with poor credit. This is a documented and well-known fact: people with good credit just aren't profitable; people with bad credit are cash cows.
The point is people are constantly fighting back against bitcoin regulation as a currency because Bitcoin isn't a bank. They also fight for Paypal to be regulated as a bank. Bitcoin isn't real money; nothing of value was lost.
There's an abusive twist of logic that shows that every American owes China about $120,000 right now; imagine if you were called on it.
We're facing a situation where our Government has essentially become the welfare family down the street who quit their job and keep filing for credit cards. This one was $21,000, the new one they're giving me $35,000, I'll do the 14 month interest-free balance transfer... ooh, this bank is offering me a card for $50,000... and so on. I know people who have credit cards with $120,000 limits and they make less than I was when I worked at K-Mart.
Essentially, the government only operates by taking on more and more debt, with no ability to control it. If the government defaults, it can't operate; so imagine the Government shutdown, plus they shut down food stamps and WIC--or print money to pay for welfare. If that stuff just shuts down, hundreds of millions (47% of the 300 million is about 1.4 hundreds of millions) will be starving on the streets--and the lack of income to shops from their purchases will lead to an economic crash, loss of jobs, further economic damage, etc. Almost everyone will be starving. If they print money, suddenly all your cash and your salary become worthless (pre-WW2 Germany style).
You're living in a fantasy. You have big screen TVs? So does the welfare family down the street. They had them when they cost $5000. Are they richer than you or just more deluded?
Yes, and this is why I keep telling people America is fucked up and the FRS is ridiculous. We don't have "economic growth"; when our economy grows, it gets poorer. When one person pays their debts and gains assets, another person must necessarily go into debt--not just become less wealthy, but actively move toward negative wealth. Poverty here is, on the books, worse than poverty in some small regions in Africa: our poor people have less than a Ugandan who has to walk 9 miles for water, but we still eat expensive beef.
It's actually a good thing that pedophiles can escape police detection.
The foundation of society relies on the ability of people to function as a dynamic social group. This means there must be rules to keep the group coherent; however it also means that there must be the possibility for transgressions to keep the group from completely destroying itself by rigid enforcement. If it were impossible to get away with anything--murder, rape, child pornography--then it would be conceivably too difficult to get away with anything else--adultery, lying, stealing a can of beer--and society would be a place where 90% of people are in prison or being executed at any given time.
It doesn't hurt to weaken the state once in a while. That does mean that everyone gets an extra chance to get away with something--including child sex actors and the mafia--but it also means you get to not be arrested for talking on your cell phone while driving that one time.
It's so highly regarded because a bunch of people regard it as highly regarded. Look at other epic trash like Shakespeare or Verne (The Time Machine is horrible--it's basically a ginormous run-on paragraph). Moby Dick is considered "High-brow reading" not because it's a good story (it's not), but because "the writing is amazing"--that is, it's written in some old modern English that makes you feel all educated and smart when you read it.
I recommend anything by Brandon Sanderson for fantasy--particularly "The Way of Kings" and "Mistborn". Chadbourne's "Age of Misrule" is good too. For sci-fi, try Donaldson's "The Gap Cycle"--the first book is brutal and the second starts slow (it's fantastic if you're paying attention, but usually you can't understand why what's happening is meaningful on the first read through), but the book really picks up about 100 or so pages into Forbidden Knowledge and it never lets off the throttle until the last few pages.
Really, "The Gap Cycle" is the modern answer to Richard Wagner's "Der Ringen des Nibelungen", the most highly regarded opera epic ever written. Donaldson set out to do exactly that. A lot of people assume this means a re-interpretation or retelling; but it's not, even at a stretch. It's like saying Weiss Schnee IS Snow White--no she's not, but yes that's what Monty had in mind.
Age of Misrule might accomplish that in the dark urban fantasy genre; The Way of Kings looks like it might be setting its place next to The Wheel of Time.
this appears as a smooth color gradient without banding on LCD. Slashdot's current theme is a subtle gradient as well. Buy an LCD with a wider color gamut than what they had in 1995.
Power requirements actually increase hyperlinearly. DDR RAM uses a serializer, for example, so that you run the RAM at 100MHz but fetch multiple bytes into a buffer and output that across your FSB. This is because running the RAM at 100MHz takes N power, while running at 200MHz takes N^2 power or something ridiculously bigger than 2N.
If they go out of business doing this with too many customers too much of the time, then they should have as their products suck.
And this is the part that people miss: they think a warranty is just lip-service and free replacements and doesn't mean a product will last that long. They don't imagine the impact of the product not lasting that long on the guy selling them the dysfunctional product.
If their drive costs more than a RAID6+0 or something else on a high-end SAN, you'll just buy cheaper drives. If their drive is less reliable and bigger, then you're in danger of more drive failures and a total failure while replacing them (rebuilding a 3TB enterprise-class Seagate drive takes up of 72 hours) and so there's too much risk unless you buy a lot more of them and make crazy shit like RAID6+0. They can't just price them obscenely expensive to make up for constantly giving out free ones.
That all means they have to reliably provide for a minimum of failures over 5 years to make sure their warranty doesn't bankrupt them. This is why warranties actually work: the "invisible hand of the market" is a thief and a charlatan, but it works pretty well when bound in a rather nasty glove that inflicts great pain when it misbehaves.
I love this idea, because it reminds me of the most energy efficient signal processing tool in the known universe, the human brain.
Dumb analogy. Being inaccurate does not make you more intelligent and won't cause emergent behavior.
Give Ken Jennings a granola bar, and he'll seriously challenge Watson, who will be needing several kilowatt-hours to do the same job.
Wrong. Ken Jennings' brain runs on blood sugar, glycogen stored in the liver from previous food (converted into blood sugar by glucagon as blood sugar is consumed for work), fat stored in consolidated fat cells from previous food (converted into blood sugar by lipolysis), and a huge set of neurotransmitters (mainly acetylcholine) stored up by prior processes. Never mind that you get 10% of the energy at each level--the plants convert 2% of the sunlight they collect to energy, which is mainly stored as inaccessible fiber and other structural work (i.e. vitamins, hormones...); herbavores (the normal analogy is 'pork chop' or 'steak') get maybe 10% of that converted energy; you get maybe 10% of the energy input from the herbavores. This is like 0.02% efficiency versus 12% efficient Photovoltaic panels or 38% efficient parabolic solar collectors, not considering the direct inefficiency of Ken Jennings' brain for converting sugar energy into useful work.
Plus, Ken Jennings is a lot more flexible. He can carry on conversations, tie shoes, etc. This is because his central processing unit basically relies on some sort of fault-tolerant software.
No, it's because he has better programming. A gerbil's brain relies on fault tolerant processing, and they can't talk or tie shoes; they can eat and have sex.
I think that there will be a lot more applications of a fault-tolerant, energy efficient software strategy, beyond just media decoding. When we get around to asking computers to be creative and apply variously-weighted "rules of thumb", I expect that those operations will run best on systems that sacrifice calculation accuracy for speed and energy efficiency. You gain almost nothing when you apply rough heuristic rules precisely. Let's allow the computers to apply rough rules imprecisely, and reap the speed and energy benefits of the trade.
Actually that's slow and stupid. This is less effective than taking a working computer with a high clock rate (SOD-CMOS at 394GHz, low-power, accurate) and seeding various inputs with a noise-based RNG (audio-entropyd measures the noise fluctuation on an unused microphone line, for example: this is just spaztastic voltage wobble from EMR).
Stop romanticising the human mind as a result of "lots of imprecise and uniquely organic failings creating something amazing and beautiful". It's a really fucking complex system.
Erm, that's the whole point. If we allowed high error rates with existing architectures, none of our results would be trustworthy. I imagine the most practical approach would be a fast, low-power but error-prone co-processor living alongside the main, low-error processor.
Or you know, the thing from 5000 years ago where we used 3 CPUs (we could on-package ALU this shit today) all running at high speeds and looking for 2 that get the same result and accepting that result. It's called MISD architecture.
Where do these people come from who think they're going to get 5 drives for the price of 1? "Oh but it's going to fail repeatedly under warranty! I'll have to get free replacements all the time, that has a real-world impact!" Uh, what has a real-world impact is the cost of constantly replacing broken drives, bankrupting the hardware vendor right out of business.
Also, This and this. They store more energy per mass, but batteries can release power faster and have roughly as good storage capacity.
In this case, the energy-per-mass storage capacity is not important: We're talking about hooking fuel cells to a gas distribution line, using them essentially as hydrogen or natural gas generators. This is something more like you'd do with a back-up generator (diesel, nat gas) rather than for full-time operation.
So this is a bunch of herpderp about "Natural gas is plentiful and cheap right now! It's slightly cheaper than electricity, so you should invest tons of money into converting to natural gas, which then when the price comes back up will require tons of investment to convert back to electricity!" The increase in demand if this caught on would make natural gas a lot more expensive than electricity.
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The major design issue is it's not a radio controlled toy?
It also doesn't account for people spending $68k for a souped-up high-speed electric sports car and crashing into concrete walls at 100mph in Mexico.
Titanium is weaker than steel.
How many Teslas are on the road versus how many gasoline cars? How many tesla-miles are driven versus Gasoline-miles?
Oh come on, there are plenty of reasons to not use fuel cells. Terrible power density, severely complex storage of fuels, inefficient decentralization of power generation.
On average, it kind of works that way.
It's making less sense because you're forgetting the concept of a "credit crunch". What do you think will happen to the economy if college students stop taking student loans?
And that's exactly what people have been fighting: Regulation of Bitcoin, taxing of Bitcoin, treating Bitcoin as a legal currency, subjecting Bitcoin to SEC rules, etc. They want it to be a Libertarian wet dream with no rules.
They kind of do.
Look at interest schedules. You often find situations where 50% of the loan is interest; but most of the interest comes up front because it's accruing on a huge balance being slowly paid down. You have $200k in that loan, you make a $1000 payment that's $990 interest accrued over 1 month; you have $50k in that loan, you make a $1000 payment that's $250 interest accrued over 1 month. The balance starts coming down much, much faster--the amount of interest that one month is 25% of what it was on the first payment, but the amount of interest over that year's payments is much less than 25% of what the bank got for the first year because you're paying your loan balance down faster.
Credit card schedules where you make minimum payments take forever to pay off. In the process, you'll pay many times more than the balance on your card. The bank also gets to claim the balance as an asset and deduct that when you default--in some cases with high-dollar mortgages, the bank can bring in more than the loan and then claim a loss (i.e. if the amount of interest they accrue is less than the remaining balance, but the remaining balance is still more than the amount of interest they accrue, they will claim a loss even though they physically have more dollars now with your total made payments all together).
There are plenty of ways to loan out piles and piles of money, have people fail to pay it back, and walk off with sacks of cash. Credit card companies--banks, actually, since Visa just rakes fees and banks stamp VISA on their cards and let VISA supply the infrastructure--sure as hell do make the bulk of their money off those with poor credit. This is a documented and well-known fact: people with good credit just aren't profitable; people with bad credit are cash cows.
The point is people are constantly fighting back against bitcoin regulation as a currency because Bitcoin isn't a bank. They also fight for Paypal to be regulated as a bank. Bitcoin isn't real money; nothing of value was lost.
There's an abusive twist of logic that shows that every American owes China about $120,000 right now; imagine if you were called on it.
We're facing a situation where our Government has essentially become the welfare family down the street who quit their job and keep filing for credit cards. This one was $21,000, the new one they're giving me $35,000, I'll do the 14 month interest-free balance transfer... ooh, this bank is offering me a card for $50,000... and so on. I know people who have credit cards with $120,000 limits and they make less than I was when I worked at K-Mart.
Essentially, the government only operates by taking on more and more debt, with no ability to control it. If the government defaults, it can't operate; so imagine the Government shutdown, plus they shut down food stamps and WIC--or print money to pay for welfare. If that stuff just shuts down, hundreds of millions (47% of the 300 million is about 1.4 hundreds of millions) will be starving on the streets--and the lack of income to shops from their purchases will lead to an economic crash, loss of jobs, further economic damage, etc. Almost everyone will be starving. If they print money, suddenly all your cash and your salary become worthless (pre-WW2 Germany style).
You're living in a fantasy. You have big screen TVs? So does the welfare family down the street. They had them when they cost $5000. Are they richer than you or just more deluded?
Yes, and this is why I keep telling people America is fucked up and the FRS is ridiculous. We don't have "economic growth"; when our economy grows, it gets poorer. When one person pays their debts and gains assets, another person must necessarily go into debt--not just become less wealthy, but actively move toward negative wealth. Poverty here is, on the books, worse than poverty in some small regions in Africa: our poor people have less than a Ugandan who has to walk 9 miles for water, but we still eat expensive beef.
It's actually a good thing that pedophiles can escape police detection.
The foundation of society relies on the ability of people to function as a dynamic social group. This means there must be rules to keep the group coherent; however it also means that there must be the possibility for transgressions to keep the group from completely destroying itself by rigid enforcement. If it were impossible to get away with anything--murder, rape, child pornography--then it would be conceivably too difficult to get away with anything else--adultery, lying, stealing a can of beer--and society would be a place where 90% of people are in prison or being executed at any given time.
It doesn't hurt to weaken the state once in a while. That does mean that everyone gets an extra chance to get away with something--including child sex actors and the mafia--but it also means you get to not be arrested for talking on your cell phone while driving that one time.
Anti-trust laws exist to prevent capitalism from working as intended. Capitalism as intended is bad.
It's computer fraud and abuse. It's not like they really robbed a bank.
Misohomosexual.
It's so highly regarded because a bunch of people regard it as highly regarded. Look at other epic trash like Shakespeare or Verne (The Time Machine is horrible--it's basically a ginormous run-on paragraph). Moby Dick is considered "High-brow reading" not because it's a good story (it's not), but because "the writing is amazing"--that is, it's written in some old modern English that makes you feel all educated and smart when you read it.
I recommend anything by Brandon Sanderson for fantasy--particularly "The Way of Kings" and "Mistborn". Chadbourne's "Age of Misrule" is good too. For sci-fi, try Donaldson's "The Gap Cycle"--the first book is brutal and the second starts slow (it's fantastic if you're paying attention, but usually you can't understand why what's happening is meaningful on the first read through), but the book really picks up about 100 or so pages into Forbidden Knowledge and it never lets off the throttle until the last few pages.
Really, "The Gap Cycle" is the modern answer to Richard Wagner's "Der Ringen des Nibelungen", the most highly regarded opera epic ever written. Donaldson set out to do exactly that. A lot of people assume this means a re-interpretation or retelling; but it's not, even at a stretch. It's like saying Weiss Schnee IS Snow White--no she's not, but yes that's what Monty had in mind.
Age of Misrule might accomplish that in the dark urban fantasy genre; The Way of Kings looks like it might be setting its place next to The Wheel of Time.
Well if the movie is true to the book, it'll look like something directed by a third grader.
24bit color isn't enough. 32 bit seems to work.
this appears as a smooth color gradient without banding on LCD. Slashdot's current theme is a subtle gradient as well. Buy an LCD with a wider color gamut than what they had in 1995.
Power requirements actually increase hyperlinearly. DDR RAM uses a serializer, for example, so that you run the RAM at 100MHz but fetch multiple bytes into a buffer and output that across your FSB. This is because running the RAM at 100MHz takes N power, while running at 200MHz takes N^2 power or something ridiculously bigger than 2N.
If they go out of business doing this with too many customers too much of the time, then they should have as their products suck.
And this is the part that people miss: they think a warranty is just lip-service and free replacements and doesn't mean a product will last that long. They don't imagine the impact of the product not lasting that long on the guy selling them the dysfunctional product.
If their drive costs more than a RAID6+0 or something else on a high-end SAN, you'll just buy cheaper drives. If their drive is less reliable and bigger, then you're in danger of more drive failures and a total failure while replacing them (rebuilding a 3TB enterprise-class Seagate drive takes up of 72 hours) and so there's too much risk unless you buy a lot more of them and make crazy shit like RAID6+0. They can't just price them obscenely expensive to make up for constantly giving out free ones.
That all means they have to reliably provide for a minimum of failures over 5 years to make sure their warranty doesn't bankrupt them. This is why warranties actually work: the "invisible hand of the market" is a thief and a charlatan, but it works pretty well when bound in a rather nasty glove that inflicts great pain when it misbehaves.
I love this idea, because it reminds me of the most energy efficient signal processing tool in the known universe, the human brain.
Dumb analogy. Being inaccurate does not make you more intelligent and won't cause emergent behavior.
Give Ken Jennings a granola bar, and he'll seriously challenge Watson, who will be needing several kilowatt-hours to do the same job.
Wrong. Ken Jennings' brain runs on blood sugar, glycogen stored in the liver from previous food (converted into blood sugar by glucagon as blood sugar is consumed for work), fat stored in consolidated fat cells from previous food (converted into blood sugar by lipolysis), and a huge set of neurotransmitters (mainly acetylcholine) stored up by prior processes. Never mind that you get 10% of the energy at each level--the plants convert 2% of the sunlight they collect to energy, which is mainly stored as inaccessible fiber and other structural work (i.e. vitamins, hormones...); herbavores (the normal analogy is 'pork chop' or 'steak') get maybe 10% of that converted energy; you get maybe 10% of the energy input from the herbavores. This is like 0.02% efficiency versus 12% efficient Photovoltaic panels or 38% efficient parabolic solar collectors, not considering the direct inefficiency of Ken Jennings' brain for converting sugar energy into useful work.
Plus, Ken Jennings is a lot more flexible. He can carry on conversations, tie shoes, etc. This is because his central processing unit basically relies on some sort of fault-tolerant software.
No, it's because he has better programming. A gerbil's brain relies on fault tolerant processing, and they can't talk or tie shoes; they can eat and have sex.
I think that there will be a lot more applications of a fault-tolerant, energy efficient software strategy, beyond just media decoding. When we get around to asking computers to be creative and apply variously-weighted "rules of thumb", I expect that those operations will run best on systems that sacrifice calculation accuracy for speed and energy efficiency. You gain almost nothing when you apply rough heuristic rules precisely. Let's allow the computers to apply rough rules imprecisely, and reap the speed and energy benefits of the trade.
Actually that's slow and stupid. This is less effective than taking a working computer with a high clock rate (SOD-CMOS at 394GHz, low-power, accurate) and seeding various inputs with a noise-based RNG (audio-entropyd measures the noise fluctuation on an unused microphone line, for example: this is just spaztastic voltage wobble from EMR).
Stop romanticising the human mind as a result of "lots of imprecise and uniquely organic failings creating something amazing and beautiful". It's a really fucking complex system.
Erm, that's the whole point. If we allowed high error rates with existing architectures, none of our results would be trustworthy. I imagine the most practical approach would be a fast, low-power but error-prone co-processor living alongside the main, low-error processor.
Or you know, the thing from 5000 years ago where we used 3 CPUs (we could on-package ALU this shit today) all running at high speeds and looking for 2 that get the same result and accepting that result. It's called MISD architecture.
Where do these people come from who think they're going to get 5 drives for the price of 1? "Oh but it's going to fail repeatedly under warranty! I'll have to get free replacements all the time, that has a real-world impact!" Uh, what has a real-world impact is the cost of constantly replacing broken drives, bankrupting the hardware vendor right out of business.
Also, This and this. They store more energy per mass, but batteries can release power faster and have roughly as good storage capacity.
In this case, the energy-per-mass storage capacity is not important: We're talking about hooking fuel cells to a gas distribution line, using them essentially as hydrogen or natural gas generators. This is something more like you'd do with a back-up generator (diesel, nat gas) rather than for full-time operation.
So this is a bunch of herpderp about "Natural gas is plentiful and cheap right now! It's slightly cheaper than electricity, so you should invest tons of money into converting to natural gas, which then when the price comes back up will require tons of investment to convert back to electricity!" The increase in demand if this caught on would make natural gas a lot more expensive than electricity.